max silver

The players on the field didn't get the job done yesterday. I don't agree with the choices that were made with regards to the substitutions on the field but the manager can't swing the bat, run the bases, pitch for the team or play a position in the field. It seems like Schneider saves his worst decisions for games against the Mariners. Last year's playoff meltdown featured several questionable moves, the game at the end of April had a lot of questionable moves, and last night's game also featured plenty of questionable moves as well.

I can see him eventually putting things together sufficiently to have a few nice seasons out of an MLB pen. I think his raw stuff is good enough to retire MLB hitters but his usefulness to the Jays has run out given how many better options the team has available.

Yeah Pete Walker absolutely has his pitchers up the usage of their least effective pitches. Like Jordan Romano basically going 50/50 fastball slider, Richards dropping the breaking pitches completely and going fastball/changeup, Kikuchi dropping the cutter completely etc. I'm not so sure about these recommendations, although there is the caveat that I haven't seen Cabrera pitch and I'm solely looking at Statcast numers. The curveball is arguably Cabrera's most effective pitch results wise, and his 4 seam fastball appears to be his least effective pitch as it generates minimal whiffs and has largely been teed off of.

I guess we'll never really know what the optimal approach would have been with regards to when to start opening the pocket books. Vlad and Bo arrived at basically the same time and improved the team sufficiently that it's possible the team would have been choosing middle of the first round after that. The shortened covid season really f***ed the team over in several aspects, in that the minor league system lost a lot of development time and Vlad and Bo each burned a full year of control despite only playing for 2 months. For a team just working it's way towards a competitive cycle this couldn't have happened at a worse time. I really hate the qualifying offer system, as it really punishes teams that actually want to spend money and add impact pieces to their roster. Losing several draft picks over the years certainly hurt after signing the likes of Springer and Gausman to supplement the young core, but at the same time there were a lot of misses on the guys who were selected through the draft. Maybe having a few extra picks in those draft years would have led to another piece or two being available to the major league squad but given this front office's drafting record this is far from a given. I have zero issue with the front office trading away prospects to supplement the major league core. They have generally been adept at identifying the true keepers in the system and cashing out on the prospects less likely to make an impact at the big league level.

I would hope the plan isn't to actually roster this guy at the major league level as he's been downright terrible for several consecutive seasons.

I'd like to eventually see a spot opened up at AAA for Leo Jiminez as he's been having a very solid season in AA New Hampshire. With Schneider/Barger/Orelvis all ahead of him there isn't a lot of space though.

I think Merrifield could cool his jets a little with the 3rd base stealing attempts. His overall season baserunning contribution is solid but he's been one of the primary culprits recently with making unnecessary outs on the bases.

I suspect part of the reason why Kirk's framing numbers are a little lower this season is due to how poorly Manoah was placing his pitches for most of the season. Kirk was Manoah's primary catcher early on and really didn't receive as many framing opportunities, and with a pitcher locating so poorly perhaps this would lead to receiving less calls on closer pitches due to the scattershot command.

You've gone full Oriole nutsack licker lately. I get it, they went scorched earth rebuild (likely forced into this due to the complete ineptitude of the previous front office and terrible ownership policy) but I don't see why you seem to spend so much of your posting time on here constantly pumping their tires.

Jesus man we all get that the Orioles are a solid team with a very bright future. The constant Orioles worship is honestly getting to be a bit much.

Oh come on man, you should know that if Manoah wasn't fixed by spending a few weeks working out of the pitching lab then it's completely f***ing useless like the really smart posters here are letting on.

Try again. The pitching lab just came online something like a year and a half ago when the new player development complex opened up.

The only thing I hope for is that Alek was intentionally throwing at something like 85% effort to get his pitches into the strike zone more often.

In his first start back Manoah featured really poor stuff but made up for it with very good command of his pitches. Stuff+ was only 82 vs location+ of 112. I'd imagine his stuff metric wasn't any better last night but the location was really bad on top of that. I certainly wouldn't want to bet on him being able to reliably locate his pitches on any given day given what we've seen from him this season.

The results of the bullpen games have generally been fine but the extra strain this placed on the pen wasn't something that could continue forever. If the club trusted Francis to throw more than a few innings at a time some of the extra innings on the rest of the pen could have been mitigated somewhat, but Francis has been giving up a ton of really hard contact so I can understand the hesitance.

Manoah had consecutive good starts before this clunker. Sure the quality of competition wasn't great but his command was much better and the stuff played up to a lot of strike outs. If it's another week or whatever until Ryu is ready they can give Manoah another start before sending him packing back to the minor league complex. If the alternative to another Manoah start is a bullpen day where the pen is blown up anyway I don't see a lot of risk in throwing Manoah out there again to see how he fares.

Kirk may have been able to get Manoah that low strike in the Soto at bat but he certainly wasn't going to coax Manoah into the strike zone more frequently.

The difference to my eyes was command this time around. It's not like the Padres hit Alek especially hard in this start, and with a little better luck he may not have allowed any runs. In the first inning he was shafted in the Soto at bat on a clear strike 3 call. Fast forward to the other inning where he allowed 2 runs a ground ball took a big hop off of third base and turned into a double, and Springer lost a ball in the lights that turned into another double.

Right now Fangraphs gives the Jays MLB's 4th highest odds to win the world series. The one hole I see on this team is a right handed slugging outfielder/DH type, that's a pretty damn solid team in my view.

You would prefer to utilize a AAA depth option instead of Kirk? Then what happens when Jansen gets hurt? Now you are running two AAA depth catchers at the major league level. All so you can trade Kirk at his lowest possible level. Hard pass to that one.

Donaldson is like the MLB version of April Orelvis Martinez this season.

Last year's bullpen was a decent enough pen that had one bad game at a really inopportune moment. This year's bullpen is much better across the board right now. This team has a tremendous bullpen, and you could easily make a case that it's an elite pen. It ranks 4th by ERA, 6th by FIP, 4th by K/9, 3rd by BB/9 etc. The pen was brought down a lot by weak performances by the likes of Cimber and Bass and a slow start from Garcia, but has improved a lot as the season has progressed. The impending addition of Chad Green is going to improve this pen further, as if Green is anywhere close to as good as he has been historically it adds one of MLB's best firemen to a pen, adds another trustworthy high leverage reliever, and removes the weakest link from bullpen at the same time. I hate this type of defeatist attitude that the current iteration of the Jays is only good because the opposition has faced injuries. There is a certain subset of the fanbase that absolutely refuses to give any credit to a Blue Jays team when it succeeds. It can't be because the team is good, it can only be because the opposition has dealt with more injuries than the Blue Jays.

The offense has scored a grand total of 6 runs less than the offense from a season ago. The biggest concern has been weak situation hitting with runners in scoring position, just as was the case a season ago. There are signs the tides are starting to turn with this particular issue. The team's run differential is +44 at this point, vs +24 after 93 games a season ago. This run differential is largely on the back of an elite defence and really good pitching staff. The bullpen in particular is a strength of this club right now. The team has a very solid 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation as well, but the pitching isn't good enough somehow? This team has the 6th best record in all of MLB. They have absolutely clobbered weak teams the way they are expected to. They have obliterated MLB as a whole save for struggling against against the Red Sox and Orioles. The team has dominated the National League, dismantling a lot of hot teams and division leaders along the way. This is a really damn good team that deserves more respect than they are receiving.

Hey now Calgary is a perfectly nice city and typically has nice summer weather. The biggest concern recently is the bombardment of wild fire smoke from the northern half of the province during the spring, and now from BC as their wild fire season is in full swing.

Sounds similar to my setup. I have an LG 77" C1 and Samsung Q950a sound bar. I've really enjoyed 4K Netflix, the shows with Atmos Audio sound absolutely fantastic. I've also found my set has really nice upscaling so even 1080p content looks a let better. Sports are a dream to watch. I made the jump to 4K once Shaw finally offered a 4K Sportsnet package in Calgary so I could watch Jays and Flames games (when available) in 4K. PS5 gaming is a real treat, as VRR does a nice job of smoothing out any framerate variations.